There’s a good reason that one my personal work methods is known as “play with everything”. Take this composition for instance; a somewhat mediocre photo (should have had my tripod, should have tried a few other f-stops, should have used flash…) is transmorgrified through the use of layer blending, filtering, and selective blurs. The end result is more CGI than photo, but it has a realism to it that is difficult to achieve through artificial means.